India’s non-performing assets are the fifth highest in the world, says CARE Ratings report
The worst four economies are Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Greece – the countries that suffered the most in the Eurozone crisis.
India ranks fifth in a list of countries with the worst non-performing asset ratios. Portugal, Italy, Ireland and Greece – four of the PIIGS nations that suffered the most in the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis – are the only countries with higher stressed loans than India, according to the list released on Thursday by credit rating agency CARE Ratings, according to Moneycontrol.
Spain, the fifth of the PIIGS nations, has a non-performing asset ratio of 5.28%, significantly lower than India’s 9.85%.
The NPA ratio shows the percentage of loans that have turned non-performing out of the total loans granted.
CARE Ratings found that Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, South Korea and the United Kingdom had NPA ratios of less than 1%. China, Germany, Japan and the United States had NPAs of between 1% and 2%.
Indian banks, especially the public sector ones, have suffered for the last several years with stressed and non-performing loans – which refer to loans the banks have little hope to recover from the borrower. This has hurt the banks’ financial health, even as the Centre and the Reserve Bank of India have taken several measures in the past two years to counter the problem.
